2014: the state of worldwide internet, social media and mobile penetration

In case you need some recent statistics to use in your investors slide deck or some market insights to help you know where to expand next, you might find handy this Global Digital Statistics 2014 report.

Prepared by the social media agency WeAreSocialSG using the newest data, the report reveals the internet penetration, the total number of social media users, as well as the mobile penetration in different regions and countries.

>>> There are 2B active social network users in the world. At the beginning of 2014, Facebook counts 1.184B users, followed by the chat app QQ with 816M users and the Chinese social networking platform Qzone with 632M users. Whatsapp falls 4th in the ranking with 400M users. The Chinese chat app WeChat has 272M users, having a higher adoption than LinkedIn (with its 259M users) and Twitter (with its 232M users). Seems like the Chinese investment holding company Tencent – that owns QQ, Qzone and WeChat – is doing pretty well in terms of traction.

>>> There are 6.5B mobile subscribers worldwide. This doesn’t mean 6.5B different people with mobile subscription, as most of them own more than one subscription (think mobile phones, tablets etc.). For example, the US has 101% mobile penetration (for its population of 351.3M there are 353.9M mobile subscriptions). Other countries with higher than 100% mobile penetration are: CEE with 151%, Western Europe 129%, South America 124%, Middle East 112%, SouthEast Asia 109%.